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Share in the accounts and discoveries of the many individuals who, just like you, set out to find new, true answers that could stand up to the test of passing time with its ever-changing conditions. Welcome these inward and uplifting thoughts as if they were your own, for in one sense… they are.
The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.
The courage of truth is the first qualification for philosophic studies.
Do not await the fulfillment of the divine cause you serve, but know that none of your efforts are fruitless, for they all advance the cause.
Though one should live through all the time from Adam and all the time to come before the judgment day doing good works, yet he who, energizing in his highest, purest part, crosses from time to eternity, verily in the sight of God this man conceives and does far more than anyone who lives throughout all past and future time, because this now includes the whole of time. One master says that in crossing over time into the now each power of the soul will surpass itself.
I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water are thirsty. You don’t grasp the fact that what is most alive of all is inside your own house, and so you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look!
Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under your observation in life.
Aye, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff. And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfillment.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
How our delight in any particular study, art, or science rises and improves in proportion to the application which we bestow upon it. Thus, what was at first an exercise becomes at length an entertainment.
The essence of religion consists solely in the answer to the question, “Why do I live, and what is my relation to the infinite universe around me?”
Do not be bewildered by the surfaces; in the depths all becomes law.
Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and tomorrow you will arrive there and know them by inhabiting them.
Death is not an event in life… we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.
The true critic strives for a clear vision of things as they are… his effort is to get free from himself, so that he may in no way distort that which he wishes to understand or reproduce. His superiority to the common herd lies in this effort… He distrusts his own senses, he sifts his own impressions, by returning upon them from different sides and at different times, by comparing, moderating, shading, distinguishing, and so endeavouring to approach more and more nearly to the formula which represents the maximum of truth.
Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.
A happy life is joy in the truth.
Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition.
Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
Consciousness of error is, to a certain extent, a consciousness of understanding, and correction of error is the plainest proof of energy and mastery.
Make not a close friend of a melancholy, sad person. He will be sure to increase your adversity and decrease your good fortune. He goes always heavily loaded, and you must bear half.
Do what you should do when you should do it. Refuse to do what you should not do. And when it is not clear, wait until you are sure.
A cucumber is bitter? Throw it away. There are briars in the road? Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, “Why were such things made in the world?”
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting.
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Our salvation consists wholly in being saved from ourselves.
